The Convergence Culture

     Convergence culture is the combination of new media and old media within a single piece of media work and the coming together of different media products/technology. The easiest and most common example of this is your smart phone, they’re able to do almost anything – you can watch television, listen to music, record videos/take pictures, play games, communicate with people through text messaging or calling, access different social media platforms and the list goes on. Cell phones today are probably the best example of convergence because it joins together multiple media technologies into one single device, which a lot of new devices do this because it allows many media technologies to form one product to perform many different tasks. This is what the new generations want, whichever device can perform more tasks and has the best features is the one more commonly chosen.

     The term convergence culture is a term coined by Henry Jenkins in his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). Jenkins’ understanding of convergence is primarily a cultural process where convergent practices include both the consumption and creation of media. He focuses on the effects of media convergence and the combination of various media that offer new forms of communication and understanding between different media sources. The more our group continued to look and read Jenkins’ work we have become very interested in it and had many discussions on different forms of convergence along with the positive and negative effects it can have on society. Despite many new creations that have resulted from convergence, like new technology devices releasing, there are also conflicts when opposing ideas collide.

     Convergence also takes a role in the social aspect of things users may utilize multiple media technologies simultaneously, such as listening to music while watching TV or playing video games. Something commonly done that our group has noticed is many people will watch one sporting event on TV or even in person, but continue to check their ESPN app on their phone to check other scores or updates from other games going on that day. Media convergence is what makes people dependent on media, individuals now a-days can’t put their phones down for 10 minutes or leave the house without it. The convergence of media products means that in theory, we do not have to leave our homes because almost everything can be achieved at the touch of a button.

     In conclusion these multiple forms of media convergence are leading us to a period of transformation that will affect all parts of our lives and those to come. It’s sparking a social, political, economic and legal disputes because of conflicting goals of the producers and consumers. The advancements in the different forms of convergence are ever-changing and the advances in technology are progressing rapidly, some of the older generations have a hard time keeping up. Our group shared experiences when we had to teach our parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles how to operate all these new devices and show them all the different programs they have right at their fingertips.

    As Henry Jenkins said, these contradictory forces are pushing towards cultural diversity, homogenization, commercialization and towards grassroots cultural production.

Original Work of Electronic Literature | Kiersten Worthy

Check out my original work of electronic literature, Trumpocalypse.
It's a hypertext novel about a fictional scenario set 3 years in the future after Trump wins presidency of the United States. It has a post-apocalyptic/science fiction feel, with a few comical references to pop-culture.

Blog Post #9 Archival Work

For our archival work since we're all big hockey fans we decided to incorporate the Pittsburgh Penguins. We would take artifacts from their original arena, the Civic Arena also known to Pittsburgh fans as "The Igloo," there are a lot of leftover pieces from this arena as well as pictures and memorabilia. The Penguins then moved into their new arena, PPG Paints Arena formally known as CONSOL Energy Center. Once we have location established, mainly with images of the locations and areas then we can move into the most dominant players that have been with the franchise like Keith McCreary, Bob Kelly, Jean Pronovost, Ron Schock, Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Evgeni Malkin and of course Sidney Crosby. There's so many players to list this is just a small handful, but with this section of the archive we can include memorabilia from players and accomplishments they made throughout their seasons as well as awards players have won. For example Sidney Crosby is amongst the most decorated NHL players having won  multiple Stanley Cup Championships, he's individually won the Hart Trophy, the Art Ross Trophy along with the Ted Lindsay Award some of these he's won more than once, some are shown below.

Also something we discussed including was players gear such as equipment like hockey sticks used by the players, goalie masks or skates, pucks and jerseys as well as autographed ones. Things like this, especially ones from the big name players, go for thousands of dollars and not everyone has the luxury of getting able to buy them or even see them, some may not by aware that they exist. This archive will be a great tool to Pittsburgh Penguin's fans who want to explore the different stages and players of their favorite franchise.

Mario Lemieux autographed jersey, average price is above $1,200.

Michel Dion - Canadian goaltender who played with the Pittsburgh Penguins in the early - mid 1980's

Hockey E-Lit

This google maps essay will take you through how the beginning of my college hockey season has played out thus far. The ups and downs that are included within any hockey season and how we as a team dealt with them and moved on. The title of this piece is "Hockey Travels."

Original Work of Electronic Literature

Here is the link to the twitter post where my original work of e-lit is published,
 http://philome.la/Sar_K5/how-it-feels

My piece is a first-hand look inside the mind of how it feels to deal with a mental illness such as depression, I've been doing collaborative work with this topic all semester in other classes for a semester project and it's something that hits a little too close to home for me and others from which I've discovered. No one likes discussing mental illness because of the stigma attached to it and that needs to come to an end. More people are willing to talk and even go get help once they realize they're not alone in this battle.

My Original Work of e-Lit

The Trip Across the Pond - is a Google Maps Essay that talks about a trip I went on to Spain the summer after my Freshman year of high school.

Blog #8 Data-mining

     Data mining is the process of discovering patterns in large data sets, the overall goal of the data mining process is to extract information from a data set and transform it into an understandable structure for further use. We got the opportunity to take our blog posts and see the patterns in each of our own individual blogs, and a group post. We were able to compare which words we used the most and see any similarities between our blogs. We all thought this was a pretty cool thing to see because we all had similarities with the words we used most often.

Sarah Francowic, blog #7 on virtual identity shows which words I used most frequently.

Mike Koleny - Data-mining for blog post #7

     The top picture is showing some of the words that were used the most in the 7th blog post. The bottom graph is showing the same thing, as well as, the number and frequency that those words were being used. The interesting this about the two images is the fact that almost all of the words overlap between the two.   

Mike Mahich data mining of the blog post #7 on virtual identity. Take a look below at how often each word is used and what is most common.

Group post - Do games count? With this group post you can see the pattern with how we consider games the most common words we used were video, games and art.